Jul 14, 2008

Stay Away from Link Farms – It’s a Must

It is very much understandable why webmasters today value links so much. This is because links are one of the effective ways to achieve search engine optimization success. However, in SEO there are some unacceptable practices and one of these is concerned with links. This unethical practice is associating your website with link farms. It is really advisable that you stay away from these.

Link Farms – Basic Definition

Link farms are a system that can instantly make your website popular, even though in truth it is not. The system will have lots of members all linked with each other through a common set of pages or a page filled with links. Some link farms are created manually but most of them are created by automated programs. It is really not hard to see why link farming is an unacceptable SEO practice. The practice basically fools the search engines and as you may already know, search engines do not take kindly to any attempts to fool them.

Link Farming Consequences

Search engines, especially the two major ones- Google and Yahoo, are very strict on imposing their rules. Besides, there are lots of people out there who are employing the right search engine optimization techniques and it would just be unfair if their efforts go unrewarded through the actions of those who resort to these black hat SEO techniques.

So here are the punishments for link farming

Search engines now check more on the quality of all the inbound links to your site rather than the quantity. So it would benefit your SEO efforts more if you concentrate on getting links from higher ranked websites than concentrating on getting as many links as you can.

Search engines also penalize link farmers. Your website’s rankings can drastically go down. In fact, your website may be all together removed from the search engine databases.

Link farming may get you popular for a while but almost all these traffic would be useless as they would not convert. And take note that the whole point of search engine optimization is to have plenty of conversions!

The only way you can succeed in the SEO world is to avoid unethical practices, therefore avoid Link Farming. This is a warning especially for novices, who are most likely to be the unknowing victims of link farms.